Ulla Johnson is a world-renowned designer. Her New York-based brand and label have become synonymous with custom prints, intricate embroideries and fine tailoring – and earned her a loyal customer base and fashion following all around the world.

What

When Ulla Johnson decided to migrate over to Magento 2, they had a very specific set of requirements. They needed the ability to build immersive content while incorporating up-and-coming fashions, designs, travels, and photography – thus creating a unique customer experience. They needed the power to control merchandising differently on category pages, search pages, and the product page itself. Finally, they needed to remove the friction involved with stock notifications to their customers.

Why

The purpose of the immersive content experience was to convey to their customers the journey embarked upon by the product. They wanted to fold The World (essentially their blog), The Collection (encapsulating the entirety of that particular “Season” collection) and the product page into one unified, immersive experience – no matter where you browsed on the site.

They also wanted a different level of merchandising control, so they could merchandise product a specific way on both catalog and search pages. They wanted to be able to create a separate configurable product for each color/fabric run, display them as separate products on category pages and search pages – but bring them together as one product on the product page. They wanted to content for each product to be as dynamic as possible.

Original Magento only allows stock notifications for customers who are logged in with an active account. We wanted guests to be able to subscribe to stock notifications – and to have the ability to choose size runs on sold-out products.

How

In order to best control the content, we used the fantastic CMS editor for Magneto 2 called Blue Foot. Along with Car of Tomorrow we customized Blue Foot and built custom content types to allow the team at Ulla Johnson the level of control (along with the look and feel) they desired – without needing to do any front-end development. Creating custom content types also ensured that the UI look and feel would remain consistent.

To achieve greater merchandising control, we designed and built a custom extension in Magento 2 called Virtual Swatches. We also designated a field in Magento that would tie the color/fabric run together and create a custom virtual swatch that shows the other available colors or fabrics. We then dynamically hyperlinked the other products into the swatch, so when you choose another fabric the page and all of the dynamic content reloads.

To improve stock notifications, we built an extension which expands on the default Magento 2 stock notifications functionality. We empowered guests to subscribe to notifications when a product comes back in stock. We also extended the default functionality to allow a pop-up of a size run within the configurable product – for when a product is completely out of stock.

Conclusion

In the end, we were able to help Ulla Johnson achieve all their very specific but fairly complex needs. With greater control of content and merchandising, along with improved and streamlined stock notifications to their customers, Ulla Johnson immediately reported an uptick in their eCommerce operation and profits.